The Point Collectivists Miss: The STATE Does Not Love You!

This is a repost of something I wrote months ago in a more private forum after reading an article pointing to one of the biggest fallacies of collectivized healthcare: “When it Comes to End of Life Decisions, the State Does Not Love You.” I believe it bears repeating here because it’s an issue of timeless importance, so here is what I wrote:

Repeat after me: a collectivist State DOES NOT LOVE YOU and never will. Loving you is not the job of a State: it is the job of your God, your loved ones, and your self. The State will not and CAN not ever insert itself into that role and has no incentive whatsoever to do so. The attitude of a collectivist state toward the individual is NOT benevolent and arguably by definition cannot be so. Those who are naively placing their faith in a collectivist concept of healthcare managed by technocrats and bureaucrats are, at best, naive and, at worst, deeply deceived or deliberately disingenuous.

To wit: “In America, people have willingly bankrupted themselves to save beloved family members. Mammon becomes meaningless when an extra treatment might give your child or a young mother a few more days, weeks, or years of life. People have hearts and souls. They connect to others, especially to those in their families.

It’s very different in socialist states, where euthanasia is the name of the game, often without the patient’s, or her family’s, agreement. In England, thousands of terminally ill people were hastened to their deaths by the Liverpool Care Pathway. It was meant to be a national hospice program that provided palliative care to the terminally ill in their final days. What ended up happening, of course, when the National Health Service started running out of money is that thousands (even tens of thousands) of elderly patients who were terminally ill, but weren’t anywhere near death’s door, were hastened to their deaths. They had become too expensive or just too difficult to manage.”

Think it can’t happen here? Think again, and read the above quote again, and a third time if necessary. It has already happened in “the mother country” across the pond. So it can happen here just as easily too.

What applies in the realm of healthcare applies in any other realm in which one ends up trusting or depending upon a collective to meet any of your needs, whether it be healthcare, housing, education, or whatever. The principle people miss is this, and to me it’s a veritable postulate: the extent to which the State values and respects the individual is inversely proportional to the extent to which the individual is dependent upon the State to meet the basic needs of existence.

Once you become totally dependent–especially on a State that has entered a condition of constrained resources, as we are seeing now in much of Europe, you become in the eyes of the state not like a treasured child to be lovingly cared for, but quite the opposite: you become a liability. In other words, the inevitable, eventual outcome is that the State will come to view the individual as a useless eater. Soylent Green is people.